"The GNOME Foundation has issued a statement in response to recent accusations that it has been supporting the acceptance of Microsoft's Office Open XML format as an ECMA standard at the expense of the Open Document Format, the open standard used by OpenOffice.org, KOffice and other free software office applications. However, whether the statement's attempt at logical rebuttal will do anything to reduce the emotions or altruism behind the criticisms is anybody's guess."

The criticism is very simple and understandable. While the old office binary formats are pretty much universal, and all office suites generally need to handle them in one form or another, OOXML is not. OOXML is simply the old binary format, regurgitated into a bastardised XML form with some new stuff thrown in for good measure - that isn't XML.

That is a common opinion that is going around around. Miguel, talking from his position as founder of gnumeric, says that OOXML has a far more usable spec for spreadsheet apps, and goes into a high level comparison of the two here http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Jan-30.html, but that it is really hard to say one spec is better then the other.

There are really only three main areas not open in OOXML, that is backwards compatibility with binary office formats, clip art, and encryption. That is far from the popular opinion that OOXML is basically an XML wrapper around binary blobs.

Miguel, talking from his position as founder of gnumeric, says that OOXML has a far more usable spec for spreadsheet apps...

Miguel can say this all he wants, but it isn't backed up by facts. Open Office, KOffice, Lotus and Google Docs are all implementing various spreadsheet features like the often criticised formulas part and people are improving it as part of something called a community.

...but that it is really hard to say one spec is better then the other.

There is ample evidence that it is going to be as close to impossible as possible to get a 100%, complete implementation of OOXML that is interoperable with Office 2007. You and Miguel should read it, because we're not going to go over it again.

There are really only three main areas not open in OOXML, that is backwards compatibility with binary office formats, clip art, and encryption.

OOXML is merely various parts of the old binary format thrown into a XML format with most of the implementation not specified. That much is obvious when you read it. Backwards compatibility is a central reason why Microsoft has justified OOXML, clip art is very much a part of the spec, and it is exceptionally inadequate for an international standard as most of it is westernised, and where's the interoperability if you can't open an encrypted document?

Saying something is open does not make it so, but then, that's all the OOXML proponents seem to have in response.

That is far from the popular opinion that OOXML is basically an XML wrapper around binary blobs.